


don't let these shakes go on

by TaleWorthTelling



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky gets counseling, Bucky's Recovery, Gen, Mentions of Rape, Post-CA:TWS, absolutely not graphic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-02
Packaged: 2018-02-03 03:25:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1729376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TaleWorthTelling/pseuds/TaleWorthTelling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky's recovery is a winding path, not a straight line, and it doesn't look like he thought it should, nor does it take him where he thought he'd want to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	don't let these shakes go on

**Author's Note:**

> So this started as a deluge of feelings about the probable brain damage that Bucky’s realistically suffered and the absolute blankness he exhibited and how hard that would be to come back from, then it turned into something else. There’s discussion of/feelings alluding to: violence/abuse, depersonalization, dissociation, rape, aftermath and recovery of rape, military violence against female soldiers, violence against an animal, manipulation, feelings of dysmorphia, and depression. It’s not really dark, but tread lightly, please, and be safe. I just wanted all the bases covered because Bucky does kind of wallow a bit and I don’t want to trigger anyone. You all know his story, though.
> 
>  
> 
> Title is from “Veteran of the Psychick Wars” by Blue Oyster Cult.

**don’t let these shakes go on**

 

 

 

+

Time is fuzzy these days. He can remember pausing for the moment between heartbeats; counting out seconds in his head waiting for a target to appear where he knew they’d be; a few times checking for a pulse. Time was infinite in these moments because the mission wasn’t complete until the mission was complete, and nothing else mattered then.

 

He hasn’t waited for coffee to percolate since 1943, he thinks, and it’s kind of maddening. It’s stretching on into forever and he’s bored already and all he wanted was a cup of coffee that wasn’t tasteless crystals out of a rusty tin, because he’s pretty sure that this is something he used to like and he wants to know.

 

He doesn’t remember when he filled the pot, though. Honestly, he doesn’t remember turning it on.

 

He’s not really sure when he walked into the kitchen. All of his mornings blend together now in a frustrating tedium.  He sniffs delicately to smell if it’s burning, takes a moment to shuffle through the scent memories he has of scorched anything to remember which one matches coffee. Shudders for a moment, catching a phantom whiff of cordite and melting synthetic fibers. Doesn’t let himself go further down that road.

 

Realizes that the pot is smoking.

 

“Shit.”

 

 In his mind he can see himself acting with alacrity and purpose, turning off the coffee, opening a window, salvaging the unfortunate brew, but in actuality he moves stiffly, sluggishly, like he’s on stilts, like twisted marionette strings are jerking him forward a few inches at a time. He does okay. He cleans up, drinks his lousy coffee with an appropriate metallic bite, and considers for a moment where he disappeared long enough to burn the damn stuff in the first place. It was fine when he last checked, and then suddenly it was long past fine.

 

He’s drinking exhaust fumes and it feels right, God help him.

 

-

 

He’s been told that having a conversation with him is like trying to hold a conversation with a person who’d dropped acid one too many times in their youth and then grew the fuck up. It’s said with a grin, but he doesn’t think it’s funny; thinks maybe lysergic acid diethylamide might have been part of a cocktail he was dosed with at least once in Hydra’s quest for total dominion over his brain. Thinks about dripping walls and tilting rooms and whispers in his ears. Then he doesn’t think anything at all.

 

It’s easier.

 

He knows that he goes in and out, and it’s not always intentional. It’s not always because he’s thinking too hard and has to shut out distractions to fish for that one thought and not always because he just can’t deal with this shit and having his own thoughts after decades of filters and lead-lined mental walls is liberating and terrifying and horrible and he can’t always remember why he valued being his own man Before because it turns out that thinking for yourself isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and he’d maybe rather just not think at all sometimes except Steve would be disappointed and

 

He squints. Looks around. He shoves his fists deeper into the pockets of the borrowed jacket he’s wearing and bites the inside of his lip. He’s nowhere near Steve’s apartment and now he has to look for a street sign and find out where the fuck he is. He’d been thinking, and then he was gone, and apparently he’d been walking the whole time; his body, as ever, miles ahead of his mind.

 

He turns around to retrace his steps and walk back, whistling because he’s pretty sure that he used to and doing what he used to do is sometimes easier that being what he used to be.

 

-

 

He spends Thursdays at a local senior center. It’s partly because some disconnected part of him knows that he belongs in a place like this, partly because he fits in with people suffering from dementia and they’re understanding of his condition without feeling the need to talk about it, and partly because, God in heaven, they like him. They really do.

 

He’s playing chess with Annette, a seventy-six-year old _great_ -grandmother still young enough to be his daughter. He’s losing, but not badly, considering that he’s not only thinking no moves ahead but is often contemplating three moves ago. He’s tracking the game, trying to memorize the flow of it, but the catch is that he’s forgotten twice now that he’s also playing it.

 

Annette gently but firmly squeezes the hand he leaves resting on the edge of the board whenever it’s his turn and he’s a little unfocused. Today the squares are blurring together a little. Last night saw him curled into himself on the floor with migraines. He hadn’t slept. The doctors that Sam and Steve drag him to keep telling him that sleep is vital to the physical healing of his brain and the formation of neural pathways. They always say that his memory might be better after he’s slept. Not that he’ll remember the past, but that maybe he’ll remember whether or not he had dinner.

 

The past doesn’t come back in memories. It comes back in physical lurches that stagger and smother and choke him. It comes back in unfamiliar scars on his body and the sensation of a sunburn and the taste of peppermint. There are no memories attached.

 

But none of that matters when he’s forgotten how to sleep.

 

So now he moves another pawn, then sits back to watch Annette make her move, appreciating the graceful, decisive motions of those weathered dark hands. They’re honest hands.

 

“My brother used to stare like that, after the war,” she says suddenly, centering each piece in its square in an effort that even Bucky can see is to buy him time with his thoughts. “He was a fine man. He raised me.”

 

He almost, out of some dormant instinct, asks what unit her brother was stationed with. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t know anymore if that would be a weird question for some kid to ask about a long-forgotten war that’s not supposed to be his.

 

Instead he looks up from the board. He thinks his face is smiling, but the muscles don’t always do what he tells them to and the nerves lie sometimes.

 

“He used to make that face, too,” she says.

 

He moves another piece without looking. The pressure behind his eyes is building and he wants to sleep.

 

Annette squeezes his hand again.

 

-

 

Steve is a bulldog when it comes to making sure Bucky is left the fuck alone until he’s good and ready to deal with people. Bucky appreciates that in a distant, abstract way. Steve doesn’t think he should fight anymore if he doesn’t want to, thinks that he should settle down and have the after-war life he’d always heard about. Thinks now’s as good a time as any to find a hobby that’s not saving Steve’s ass from the fire.

 

He doesn’t remember what he used to do for fun and he’s asked Steve not to tell him. He’s not sure he can deal with Steve’s expression when something that used to bring him joy registers only blankness now.

 

Of course, that’s in a long list of Steve-related things that he’s not sure he can deal with. One of which is Steve himself.

 

It kind of hurts to be around him, in the way that the planet is kind of full of water. Sometimes when Steve speaks there’s a rushing sound in his ears, a blur of colors colliding, like someone’s taking both sides of his head and yanking them apart. He knows that his expression doesn’t change because Steve just keeps looking at him with that same sadness he’d learned when he was six and some neighborhood boys tried to set a stray cat’s tail on fire.

 

Bucky had kissed his scraped elbow and bruised cheek and they’d stayed with the cat ‘til it passed, stroking where they could.

 

He remembers this, but he has no idea who he lost his virginity to or when it even happened. He can’t ask Steve. He still remembers how he’d looked at the cat.

 

-

 

Every day is a trade-off. One week he successfully names the actors in _Mutiny on the Bounty_ without prompting, but his hands shake the longer the day wears on. The next week his motor skills are fluid and dexterous, he feels strong in his skin without the need to hit something, but he misspells his middle name. He laughs bitterly because it feels like the thing to do.

 

What’s life without sacrifice, anyway?

 

He can see the letters in his mind, but they don’t always mean anything to him. Most of the Soldier’s orders came through sharp looks and harsh sneers. They pointed, he killed. Anything more specific than that and they told him to his face, with the qualifier that they were usually talking over him to somebody nearby, like he was particularly observant furniture.

 

There’s a part of him that would like to know why he didn’t rise up and slaughter everyone in the room on any given occasion. He could have.

 

There’s a much louder, cynical part of him that knows, knows down to his bones, that the crushing weight of the apathy and depression he’s been slogging through since he started to work through his shit is about equal to the colossal  force of oppression he’d faced at Hydra’s hands.  Which is to say that he just hadn’t _cared_. He sees himself in that goddamn chair, watches outside of his own body as he accepts the mouth guard and the hands that shove him down and braces for the machine.

 

He sits in the park to breathe in fresh air and breathe out noxious fumes. His mind is a furnace. It’s raging and hot and charred around the edges. He smolders.

 

Children are playing twenty feet away to his left. There’s a teenage couple on a date directly behind him, hands in each other’s pockets. There are artists scattered under trees.

 

None of them know of the inferno behind his eyes, of the destruction he’s wrought and the splinters he has left. He looks peaceful. Two little girls smile at him on their way by, snapping their gum and giggling to each other. He can see little Captain America keychains on the backpack one of them dangles from her shoulder. He tracks them down the path until they turn at the bend and disappear from view, then re-centers his gaze on his shoes.

 

There are pamphlets in his bag and, for the first time in a long time, he’s angry. He won’t look at them, but he can’t throw them away. There’s very little academic or practical study of the things that were done to him. They can only guess, can only compare. He was tortured, he was trafficked, he was a captive. He was an unwilling soldier and now his brain doesn’t work so they’re treating him as a PTSD-case with a TBI and possible degeneration.

 

Now the doctor he sees three times a week is saying –

 

Well. 

 

It’s not something he’s ever thought of. On some level he’s aware that he was less than a lackey, more of a dog, or an object. He knows that he was violated, can feel that surely when his hands (one human and weak; one so, so heavy) skim his body in the shower, how it feels wrong to the touch. How it doesn’t belong to him. He cut his hand opening a can and didn’t feel it until Sam told him that he was bleeding.

 

He’s not sure what being raped is like. He hopes it’s not like this. The words wouldn’t change anything, but he was once a man before he was a toy and it unsettles him. He knows, he knows, he _knows_ that it’s not the same, and even if it was … well, it’s not like men are immune. Neither were boys he’d known in Brooklyn.

 

But not him.

 

-

 

Sam Wilson likes to stop by the apartment with fresh baked goods that Bucky suspects he made himself. It’s too damn homey, but he appreciates it. Now that he’s not constantly in use or training he’s not the hulking mass of muscle that he was, but he still works up quite an appetite just sitting around thinking about sitting around some more. More changes.

 

He doesn’t remember eating in the last seventy years any more than he remembers sleeping. Obviously he was fed, or nourished in some way, but he doesn’t even remember holding a fork. Though that could be for other reasons.

 

When he slipped away from Hydra to find himself, he realized, finally, three hours down the line from the helicarrier crash, that the grinding in his stomach, pulsing in his skull, was simple hunger. He’d tried to eat everything with his hands for a while, before he got used to holding silverware again. When he eventually did this in front of his friend, Steve just settled a look in his direction and wordlessly dropped his own fork. They ate together in companionable silence and trailed crumbs down their shirts and it’s been the most comfortable moment he’s shared with Steve since.

 

The expectations, since that first night, have grown.

 

He likes Sam, though, as much as he can like anyone. He feels kind of bad about trying to kill him.

 

But sometimes he can’t really leave well enough alone.

 

He sees the pamphlets sticking out of Bucky’s bag from where he’d reached for them finally in a fit of frustration only to drop them like he’d been burned. His expression doesn’t change, but his grip tightens around his fork. “Those are some good organizations. Smart people, good work. Messy work. But they care.” And he doesn’t say another word.

 

The pecan pie he’s been picking at feels heavy in his stomach, whipped cream curdled in his mouth. Sam keeps eating.

 

“I wasn’t—“

 

The words come out of him in a rush, but there’s nowhere for them to go. They hang between them in the air.

 

Sam raises an eyebrow. Bucky buries his face in his hand, runs his fingers through the hair he hasn’t washed in four days because he can’t stand showering and having to face this broken, foreign body.

 

“I’m pretty sure no one would have bothered. I mean, I can’t say for sure, and I probably wouldn’t have fought them or said no” – he swallows the bile that rises as he realizes that, yes, he knows for sure that he wouldn’t have resisted, and now that’s yet more knowledge he’s going to have to live with—“but I don’t … think that happened. So I don’t really need to look into it. You can stop looking at me like that now.”

 

“Not lookin’ at you like anything, Buck. You do what you have to do. Be where you need to be. Don’t write anything off, though.” He looks pointedly at the pie – Bucky is sure now that he baked it himself – and Bucky picks up his fork again.

 

-

 

Bucky moves the pamphlets around three or four more times, not wanting to look at them or let them get too settled in one spot to become part of the landscape, and of course Steve finds them.

 

Bucky can’t really deal with the face that Steve makes when he sees them. Normally he schools his expressions into submission before they can rise to the surface, but apparently this one is too much even for him. Steve doesn’t ask, but he looks at Bucky questioningly, looks at him like he has another sin to tack onto the wall of atonement that he carries on his back under that shield.

 

Bucky shrugs. He should explain, but he doesn’t. He can’t even explain it to himself.

 

Steve nods. Then he continues out the door to go save people and change the world.

 

Bucky sits in ripped jeans with his boots on the coffee table and stares at the address on the paper in his lap.

 

When Steve comes home later that night, his eyebrows are singed and his shoulder is swollen purple and blue. He smells like a warzone.

 

Bucky hasn’t moved.

 

-

 

He’s been told that anxiety is normal for a man in his situation, but he doesn’t seem to have felt any. Truthfully, he thinks he’s lost the ability to feel fear. Reality was worse than his nightmares. After the initial burst of emotional static he’d felt coming out of his trance … well, there hasn’t been much of anything. Or there might be, but it’s so dim that it’s hard to tell.

 

He knows that his chest tightens in the same way when Steve is out fighting as it does when Steve is alone with him. He’s not sure what that says.

 

 

-

 

People don’t look at the arm if they can help it, unless he’s looking away, in which case they hastily look their fill until he turns around again. He sees them, but he doesn’t really care. Steve tries to treat it as if it wasn’t a deadly weapon, doesn’t give it any more or less acknowledgement than he would have any other part of Bucky’s body. It unsettles him, but he gets over it fast.

 

The arm should feel alien and strange. It doesn’t. It’s the body that James Buchanan Barnes was born with that he doesn’t recognize.

 

He stands naked before a mirror. This body is a map of his life and he needs to trace it back and learn it again. He forces himself to stare until his eyes itch. Takes a marker and drags bold black lines from scar to scar like constellations. It looks almost as mechanical and macabre as his arm. He circles the ones that he knows for sure are from Before in blue and the ones he knows for sure are After in green. The accidents he crosses out in purple.

 

The marker tickles and he sweats a little. The lines blur.

 

Sometime after he’s started on the marks on his legs, he looks down and has a peculiar thought. He hasn’t jerked off since 1945. Hasn’t even tried. Feels no particular inclination now. But it’s his body, and it’s peaceful, and the smell of the markers is starting to give him a headache. He slowly takes himself in hand.

 

He actually doesn’t know whether he used to do this right or left-handed.

 

He’s pretty sure Steve did it left-handed, though, the contrary little shit. He walked in on him enough times.

 

He blinks hard. He remembers Steve’s masturbation habits better than his own and even he knows how fucking sad that is.

 

He puts his pants back on. It’s not giving up. Today’s just not the day.

 

-

 

A deeply hidden part of Bucky had always felt, despite his efforts to convince himself otherwise, that what those scientists had done to his friend Steve, to his brother, was unnatural. He could never get tired of watching the gentle, even rise and fall of Steve’s chest as he slept; would always be grateful watching him be comfortable in his skin for the first time. He was healthy and capable of all the things he’d always wanted to do. Bucky wanted the world for Steve.

 

But no man should be able to leap thirty feet across a burning chasm and no man should be able to leap speeding cars on a highway and brake his skid with his fingers. No one should be able to survive a lifetime of ice. After what had been done to him, Bucky couldn’t help but feel even more strongly the cost of their transformations.

 

What’s done is done. He learns how to use the arm for precision and intricacy instead of brute violence. He builds a house of cards. (They’re reprinted Captain America and His Howling Commandos trading cards that he picked up at the corner store for five bucks. Now that Steve’s alive again they’ve printed a ton of the damn things.)

 

-

 

Steve goes out to save the world and Sam brings him increasingly exotic comfort food (and wild stories of his growing relationship with that woman Bucky’d shot twice, Natasha) and Bucky tries to work up some interest in anything at all. He reads.

 

According to Wikipedia, Sergeant James “Bucky” Buchanan Barnes was born in Indiana. The book in Bucky’s lap says that’s wrong.

 

Bucky rolls the name around his mouth like he can feel out the truth by tasting it. “Indiana.” It feels unfamiliar on his tongue. Maybe Wikipedia was wrong.

 

He feels no connection to Brooklyn either, though, despite the decades Shadow Heroes: Captain America’s Men tells him he spent there. For a book with a lousy title it’s been awfully lauded for faithfully describing the exploits and inner workings of the Howling Commandos. Bucky has his doubts. It seems a little clean to him. He can’t imagine ever living a life not soaked in blood; can’t identify with this sanitized history.

_Often relegated through the course of public consciousness to Captain America’s sidekick, Sergeant Barnes’s legacy among the United States Armed Forces continues to be his unwavering loyalty, ability to work seamlessly with his team, superior long-range shooting skills, and his dogged fearlessness in dire situations._

 

Whichever one is right (if either one is), Bucky doesn’t recognize the man in the book. The pictures make him uncomfortable, like looking at his face in a funhouse mirror, and the text is pointless and empty. He’s not sure what he wants to know, but he knows that he’s not finding it in this book.

 

Steve comes home bruised again and sits gingerly across from Bucky at the table. He reads the page Bucky’s on (upside down, the ridiculous bastard) and make a funny noise. “I dunno about that one, Buck. Sometimes I think the American historians get a little too caught up in it all. I read a pretty good French one. Lots of emphasis on the boys instead of me. Although it made me realize my French never quite made it up to Gabe’s level. Made me miss Jacques."

 

Bucky grunts in response, his eyes trained on the same line on the page he’d been reading when Steve walked in. He appreciates the effort. He forgets sometimes that Steve had needed his own time to catch up and figure himself out when he’d woken up, that he isn’t as put together as he seems. He used to see Steve’s cracks and dents without reminding. He pictures Steve sitting alone in an empty apartment reading books upon books about a future now passed that he’d shaped and a life he could no longer reach. It’s exactly the kind of masochistic thing Steve would do under the guise of informing himself. He has the sudden urge to shake him, just take him by the shoulders and shake him good and hard and clutch him ‘til his fingers go numb.

 

They’re not reading the same books for the same reasons, though. Steve stays silent for a moment longer, then he sighs as he gets up, not wincing but clearly in pain. Stubborn bastard.

 

Bucky only reads a few more pages before he closes the book on a picture of him and Steve with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Steve looks the same. Bucky doesn’t look like anyone.

 

His fingers close around the address in his pocket. He goes to bed.

 

He doesn’t sleep, but he doesn’t think either, so it’s not a bad trade-off.

 

-

 

 

He wants to hide in a corner. He wants to find a shadow to curl into and wait and watch. He wants to go back to the apartment and kick himself for showing up in the first place. He wants.

 

He doesn’t want to scare anyone there, though, some random guy who shows up and then just skulks around and leaves.  So he makes himself smaller, sits somewhere well-lit, tries to open his body language as much as he can. He is no threat to them. Only to himself.

 

Some of the women here are only girls, or at least they should be. They’re so young, but they look so old. There are two other men. They don’t seem as willing to talk. They look lost, like they’re shocked to be here.

 

Bucky kind of feels like he woke up and found himself in this room, but he’s not sure if he blanked out again or he’s distancing himself from the decision. He’s so far gone that the latter might be considered progress.

 

No one makes him talk or sizes him up or looks at him strangely. He says nothing, but he listens.

 

-

 

Sam brings him books on pop culture and philosophy and whatever looks interesting that day, and flash drives full of music he’d loved growing up and music he loves now, and one afternoon a box full of board games and something called Jenga (that he’d say was practice for the arm, but Bucky’s not so sure about that). It doesn’t feel like he’s trying to educate Bucky or teach him about himself. It feels more like he’s sharing himself with Bucky, like he can hand over the pieces Bucky’s missing by ripping out his own and rebuilding him from better bones, propping him up with his strong spine until he can hold himself up. He’s offering Bucky nothing more than the promise of his friendship and kindness and compassion, and that is enough, more than enough some days.

 

Bucky already has Steve’s friendship, and it’s not enough _and_ too much, and he doesn’t know why. He plays one round of Jenga with Steve but gets nervous and keeps knocking it down. Then he gets frustrated and embarrassed. Then Steve feels like he’s done something wrong.

 

They play Uno after that.

 

Bucky thinks maybe the difference is that Sam is showing him what a whole person looks like, even with his scars, and Steve isn’t whole anymore, leaving out the parts of himself he ignores for Bucky’s sake and the parts he denies for duty. Maybe they can’t help each other until at least one of them is.

 

-

 

He can’t go to the veterans meetings. He doesn’t feel like one of them. He’s been stripped of the right to sit among the other soldiers and call himself their brother. But among the survivors of private wars waged against their bodies and dignity … he finds more solace than he would have thought.

 

He listens to a woman talk openly about the soldier in her own unit who’d raped her, then gotten her dishonorably discharged even though she never told. His face changes then, but he only knows because of the haunted look she trains on him. His fists have clenched. He relaxes them, raises his brow in supplicating apology.

 

She wraps her arms tighter about herself and then she sits up straighter, and he can see the steel in her eyes as she talks about the petition she’s started for women like her. He signs it first.

 

-

 

He buys a digital timer so that he won’t forget turning things on and he never burns the coffee again. It doesn’t taste as familiar as he thinks it should, but it’s good, and he leaves Steve a cup some mornings. The cup is always waiting in the dish drainer by evening.

 

-

 

Sometimes he feels like a fraud, sitting in that room and listening to these women and men and their heartache and anger and shame. But no one makes him find the words of what happened to him, so no one can compare their truths. Violation of soul is violation of soul. The body is the conduit.

 

When he talks, finally, about relearning his body, figuring out how to navigate the landscape and gritting his teeth against the intimate betrayal, they nod. Their eyes are not sad. He wants to be touched, but he can’t reach out. They understand. The things that should be familiar to him are foreign and sharp, the supportive friend too perfect and beautiful to be tainted with this confusion.

 

They hold out their hands to him. They don’t speak.

 

 

-

 

He doesn’t have a job and he doesn’t have hobbies and, despite what his brain tells him, his body is in top shape. He’s bored. He starts going down to the community center where the meetings are held and asking to volunteer. The folks working there are friendly but skeptical, and he gets it. He’s an imposing guy and they have a specific purpose. Not everyone they help can stand the sight of a man like him. Or men at all, in some cases. But it helps him, in a sick way, to be reminded that his outside is correct. He looks like he can do harm because he can do harm and people should know that he is not safe. He shouldn’t forget what he is.

 

To these people, though, he is safe. He might one day give up and shoot himself in the head; could stumble over a dormant trigger phrase and blow up Steve’s apartment; might very well, though it makes him cold to linger on it, wake up to find his hands around Steve’s limp throat, his face blue like his uniform.

 

He could do any of those things and he should be reminded and he has to atone for them. But he’s never been cruel, not even as the Soldier. He would never do what they’re afraid of.  He convinces them to give him a chance, proud of himself for finding something he really wants and fucking making it happen. It’s fleeting and it’s gone before he gets to the end of the block on the way back to Steve’s place, but it was real, and he felt it, and he remembers.

 

The next morning he shows up and sorts mail. He doesn’t speak to anyone, but he feels okay when he leaves.

 

-

 

Bucky reads on the bus so that he doesn’t spend the whole ride staring at other passengers and strategizing how he would engage and/or escape. He doesn’t want to fight, so he doesn’t want to think about fighting. The hyper-vigilance has eased by now and, anyway, he’d win, no contest. Eighty years ago that thought would have swelled his chest with pride, but now it’s just a fact. He’s well-trained and competent at one thing and losing wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, but it’s not an option anymore.

 

So he makes himself look down at the borrowed book in his lap while the bus rattles and moves. There are books at the center about equality of all kinds and social responsibility and justice. It sparks an anger deep within him that doesn’t burn but instead warms him with purpose. He likes the idea of building a future instead of tearing down the past; likes that there’s a world beyond the binary where he can have some room to grow into whoever he is now.

 

He’s still reading about the suppression of bodily autonomy among intersex individuals when he gets off at his stop. The streetlamp casts wavy shadows over the pages. Some kid oozes up behind him with intent, thinking that Bucky is distracted. Bucky whips his head around to stare him in the eye.

 

Bucky doesn’t lose anymore. But tonight he doesn’t have to fight. They both walk away intact.

 

-

 

 

Steve thinks that Bucky’s demons determine the vacancies left to spare for his own. Bucky knows this. It’s why Steve exercises ‘til a normal man would pass out, ‘til his own enhanced body is sore and shaking. It’s why he doesn’t talk. He could be run through with a two-by-four standing at the eye of a hurricane and not flinch in the wind. It’s not because he’s tough, though he is.

 

He can’t face those things when he knows that someone, anyone, is facing something bigger. Right now that’s Bucky, but it’s not like he was ever particularly tuned into his emotions Before. He’s pretty sure, at least, that that’s where the stubbornness comes from.

 

Bucky could laugh if it weren’t all so fucked up and typical. Neither one of them will deal with their problems and it all comes down to not being worthy of the other. Even he knows that’s never going to work.

 

Steve says that it’s to be battle-ready, to occupy himself, because he just plain likes it. All of those answers have just enough truth to be real. On a less reserved night he even admitted that it was just because he could, and because he couldn’t have before. Some part of him filled with a child-like glee that he hadn’t possessed when he _was_ a child still marveled at the things he could make this body do, and he wanted to do them all.

 

Still true. Still not the point.

 

Bucky says nothing. He watches Steve swing from the bars at the gym, his chest starting to pink from exertion and his breaths coming quick but even. He wonders, in a far off place of his mind, whether he and Steve have ever fucked. Steve hasn’t said. He won’t ask. His feelings for Steve are muddled and complex and he can’t tell whether any of them is arousal, or even romantic but non-sexual love, which he’s learned is an option. Maybe he’s always known.

                                                                                                                                                                                                            

If there was something between them once upon a time, it’s long gone now, and it isn’t coming back. That was that. But it’s okay to wonder. All he has of his past is the wondering these days. It’s the only part that doesn’t feel like a stitch in his side, like he’s run too fast without stretching.

 

Steve lands hard on his feet, solid and unwavering, and flashes Bucky a brief, sly grin.

 

 

-

 

Steve doesn’t touch Bucky. He looks like he wants to sometimes, but not in abortive movements or half-hearted gestures: he’ll freeze in a memory of what he would clearly like to do, then shake it off. Other people, people who don’t know his story (or at least don’t know all of it), they’ll touch Bucky. Steve sees sometimes and looks a little like he’s about to say something. He doesn’t. But he still doesn’t touch him, even though Bucky doesn’t flinch, not after the first few weeks when he was still a little hyped up on adrenaline shakes and withdrawal from the drugs Hydra had pumped him with, too sensitive and miserable to even be able to stand a breeze, let alone human touch.

 

Why should he be worried people will hurt him? He’s seen evil. He knows what it looks like. The woman in the park who touches his arm as she laughs? He knows where she could keep a weapon hidden, dressed as she is; he knows how fast she could likely arm herself if she were carrying; and he’s casually surveyed all of those places and found them safe.

 

He also knows four different pressure points that would render her unconscious in seconds. He pushes down the defensive knowledge, but he knows that it will always be a part of him. He doesn’t flinch.

 

-

 

He is not weak. He is not broken. It’s the end result of being more pliable than Steve, able to be shaped to do the necessary, dirty things others would not. He’d been like that in Brooklyn and during the war. Maybe it was only natural that he’d end up where he had. So he never broke, but the pieces were rearranged and snapped back into place in the wrong order, backwards and crooked and jagged and pulling and grinding.

 

He is not weak. He wakes up every morning, even when he hasn’t really slept, and puts his feet on the floor.

 

He is not weak. He has to talk to Steve.

 

-

 

Sometime after being frozen and waking up alone Steve learned to make excellent coffee. Bucky eyes him pouring two cups and continues buttering a small mountain of toast.

 

He and Steve have made it back to each other the long way around. They owe it to each other to be direct and not waste any more time. It’s as precious as it is unbearable.

 

“I have to go.”

 

Steve pauses mid-stir, head down. He clears his throat. “Where?”

 

“I don’t know yet.” He takes a deep breath. The last thing he wants to do is hurt Steve, but he wants Steve to have faith in him, to believe in him like he always believed in Steve, and he has to offer that faith in return. Steve’s always been made of strong stuff. “I can’t be around you for a while.”

 

Steve looks up then. He’s stricken only for a flash of a moment. Bucky sees it, but he waits. Steve wants to ask what he did. He’s going to dissect everything he thought that he’d been doing to help.

 

It won’t work. It’s nothing that Steve’s done or hasn’t done.

 

Bucky’s welfare isn’t about Steve. Neither is his life. It can’t be, not anymore. He’s finally gotten that through his head. He loves Steve like nothing else he’s ever known, and he knows that Steve loves him, which is why he’s realized something important. He doesn’t owe Steve his happiness. He owes it to himself. He wants Steve to want that for himself, too.

 

“Whatever you need, Buck ….” Steve’s gaze darts around the room, at the possible escape routes that he knows by heart already. _Don’t go_ , he’s saying. _Don’t leave me again. Don’t make me do this alone. You’ll take my heart with you. Don’t do this to me._

Bucky is keeping Steve vulnerable the same way that Steve is keeping Bucky on edge. They can’t live in the past. They can’t protect each other the way that they used to. He’s always been willing to slap sense into the kid to save him from breaking his neck. He remembers.

 

Steve will never deal with his own pain – not the hurt caused by Bucky or the vicious wounds he had nothing to do with, the ones still quietly bleeding that Steve thought no one saw, as if Bucky couldn’t smell the blood – not as long as Bucky is around to fuss over, then pretend not to fuss over. And Bucky can’t figure out who the hell he is with Steve there as his center. It only throws him off-balance now.

 

He needs to learn how to walk with his gravity firmly back where it belongs, high in his chest and buoying his heart.

 

Steve will appreciate the sentiment. Eventually.

 

“I do. I do need this.” He puts his hands on Steve’s shoulders, the one that’s not his and the one that he’s struggling to accept (not always the same designation on any given day). “I love you, you punk kid. I survived a fucking train fall just to tell you that. I love you so much that I’m not gonna let you get lost in your head the way I did.”

 

“Bucky—”

 

“Let me finish. I think I can be okay. I think maybe … I think maybe I can be kind of happy. Something like it. Not like what I thought it was when we were kids, but maybe happy now is just some space and a quiet place to think my own thoughts. Maybe it’s seeing the Grand Canyon whenever I damn well want to, ‘cause I can. I might even help people eventually. Whatever it is, it’s not fighting. Not anymore. And you’re still in the thick of it, ‘cause it’s who you are, and you were born kind of unhappy. You break my heart.

 

“You think you gotta help everyone before you can sit down a minute and collect yourself, and it just ain’t true, Steve. It just … It can’t be. This is not all there is. You taught me to love people when all they did was spit at you and knock you down, and I’m tellin’ you, you were right. If all of this has taught me anything, maybe it’s that the world will keep spinning whether we’re doing anything or not.”

 

This is the most he’s said at one time in the last year. He’s not done yet.

 

Steve is looking at some point past his shoulder. Bucky lifts his metal hand to tip Steve’s face toward his. He wants him to know that he’s serious. “Don’t. Feel what you feel. You’re allowed.”

 

“That’s a little … “ Steve winces. It’s a little unlike you. It’s not like you used to be. That’s what he was going to say.

 

“If I haven’t earned the right to talk about my goddamn feelings then what’s the point of calling yourself Captain America and taking the moral high ground?”

 

“Yeah, I know,” Steve says. His face says different, but he’s listening. Bucky’s always been the more emotional of the two, has always been the one who knew what he wanted and what he thought and how he felt about those things. Steve had known his own soul, had always been everyone else’s conscience, but Bucky had always been honest with himself.

 

Steve was a part of him. He could be honest with him, too.

 

“It’s not forever. It’s just … hard to look at you, Steve. I remember and I don’t and sometimes I can’t breathe, it hurts so bad. Like I’m seeing double and I can’t reconcile it. You’re more me than I am right now, at least how I was, and whether or not you see it, you’re expecting me to be a certain way and I can’t. I just can’t. Maybe won’t ever.

 

“We’re part of each other whether I’m here or not. There’s no more wondering.” He smiles, even though it’s a little weak. “Hey, you used to walk off and leave me all the time, right in the middle of whatever we were doing, to go help some old lady or, you know, sign up for war. I’d turn around and you’d be gone. At least I’m telling you.”

 

He’d meant it as a joke, but even he can tell that his attempts at humor these days don’t land anymore. He used to make Steve laugh even when he had to be serious and concentrate for everyone’s sake. Now he’s breaking Steve’s heart into even smaller pieces. (Pieces that he intends to keep safe until he can come back.)

 

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have taken you for granted. I just … I thought you’d always be there. I was the sick one. I couldn’t imagine life without you when you were all I had left and that’s not fair to you. It wasn’t then either. I know you were just trying to help me and I was stubborn and I waded into a war I didn’t understand fully and dragged you back with me just ‘cause I was used to havin’ you at my back and I didn’t know any better and I couldn’t imagine not having you there and I didn’t let myself think about the future because I guess I never thought I had one and—”

 

Bucky slides his hand to cup the back of Steve’s neck and pull him forward. He presses them forehead to forehead and shuts his eyes. Steve stops rambling, his chest heaving and the hair at his nape sweaty.

 

“I’ve said everything I got to say,” Bucky finally whispers into the silence. Steve’s breathing has synced with his like when they were kids. Bucky’s glad that he has those memories. “We keep finding each other like this, Steve. You really think we won’t find each other again?”

 

“None of those reunions is exactly what I’d call reassuring, Buck.” He’s not crying. He sounds like he could, but he’s keeping it in check. Bucky would look the other way if he did.

 

But he won’t.

 

Bucky sighs and pulls away. “You’re picking your friends pretty well these days. Stick with Sam. I like him.” _He’ll look out for you. He’ll carry the weight._

 

“He makes a damn fine pie,” Steve agrees.

 

Bucky sits down to his toast and coffee. Steve’s face scrunches for a moment while he tamps down whatever’s in his head, but he sits, too, and eats the toast Bucky hands him.

 

Bucky’s bag is already packed and waiting in the hall. It smells like Steve and he’s kept every drawing that Steve set aside long enough to forget about.

 

There’s the key to a sublet apartment in a side pocket and his schedule at the community center next to that. It’s not a guarantee that he’ll stick around and build roots. He could disappear onto a bus next month and land across the country, for all he knows.

 

But it’s his. He’s fought tooth and nail and he’s earned the chance to try.

 

They finish their coffee in silence. The words don’t come, but they’ve never needed them anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> To be clear: Bucky was not sexually assaulted in this story. He's not sure, so I wasn't clear, but the point is that his feelings are similar to a survivor's and it's where he finds his recovery. 
> 
> Thank you for reading this. This one really hurt to write. Apparently my new rule for fic is to write it, forget about it for a couple of months, then see if I can post it. Fingers crossed because it's ... kind of a different take on Bucky's situation.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [where the winds of limbo roar](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11266404) by [TaleWorthTelling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TaleWorthTelling/pseuds/TaleWorthTelling)




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